Fanficcers all, what is our problem with canon charas' love interests?

Okay, I know, people rant about this a lot here - but before you all hit the metaphorical back button in disgust, bear with me a second. I've got a point here which has started to bug the Hell out of me, so much so that I couldn't take it any longer, had to stop what I was doing and interrupt my latest spork over at weiss_badfics to take my complaint to fanficrants.

Now, I'm a fair-minded ficcer. I can understand why you, you fannish butterfly with your non-canon pairing (and don't we all have non-canon pairings?) or your shiny Mary Sue (and yeah, most of us have them, too) might feel a little bit of resentment toward a female character - we'll call her, and let's pick a name at random here, Ouka - who is chasing after or has actually snagged the attention of the kewt male character, let's call him Omi, whom you think would be much better suited to marking time with another male character who we will name Nagi. Or, of course, your Shiny Mary Sue who we will call, for the sake of this rant, Serenity Markham Moonflower.

I can understand that might make you feel just a touch resentful. I can even understand why you might resort to saying Mean and Nasty Things about poor Ouka because she's got her paws on Omi and he'd look so much cuter kissing Nagi or snuggling up to your shiny Suebeast. Again, we all do it - though a lot of us can keep it out of our fanfics and it's always nice when that happens.

Now let us imagine that Ouka is dead.

Imagine that canon has categorically, utterly and totally killed her off. Imagine that she's only in the series for a few episodes and after that she's very definitely gone. She has shuffled off her mortal coil and is an ex-love interest. She dies onscreen and there's no way she's coming back given what we later find out about what happened to her corpse. Also, even if she'd stuck around there's no way she and Omi would have continued putting the moves on each other but Ouka's a bit of a special case so I'll stop right here...

Does it still look particularly reasonable to bash the poor girl just because she's stopping Nagi or Serenity Markham Moonflower from getting down and dirty with Omi?

I would say no. I would say that, hey, Ouka's gone. She's not coming back. Great, now general-I can write my Omi x Nagi smut all I want without having to worry about getting Ouka out the way because she show's already done it for me. All I have to do to deal with the Problem of Ouka is set my fic after she's died. I won't even have to mention her if I don't want to. Simple, right?

... apparently not. Never mind that Ouka's out the way, we the fen apparently still aren't content to just leave her be. Nope. Apparently we've now got to write little throwaway lines into our fic explaining that oh, Omi didn't really love her. That wasn't real love, that was just a crush. Or, worse, oh, he was just humoring her! He didn't know how to turn her down and he just let her hit on him because he was too polite to tell her how much he hated her guts.

Which is all very well and good, fanthing, but, um, WHY are you doing it?

Look. The character is DEAD.

It's exactly the same when a character writes themselves out all by themselves. Let's imagine another girl leaving her lover because she wants to live abroad and he, for reasons of his own, can't come with her. She never comes back either and even if she did her ex-boyfriend would know better than to try and pick up from where they left off. There's no need to pretend he never liked her. She's thousands of miles away. She isn't going to stop us pairing her ex-boyfriend up with whoever the Hell we want to because she's NOT IN THE SAME HEMISPHERE.

It's the same with characters whose exes are now happily married. And so on, and so on, and so on.

There is no obstruction. There's nothing stopping us from writing our slash or our Sues. We don't have to do these characters down when they're no longer an issue. It's perfectly safe for the guys and girls they left behind to think fondly of them.

What's the problem with admitting to the existence of the canonical partners our characters of choice have very categorically left behind? What's the matter with admitting to the fact that yeah, these guys and girls loved their utterly-out-of-the-picture exes? Does not being the First True Love of said canon chara's life make their New Loves less pure? Does admitting that, God Damn, my cute uberuke used to have a girlfriend mean the guy's been permanently corrupted by Girl Cooties?

Of course it doesn't. So why do so many ficcers out there insist that former girlfriends do just that? Just because someone's had a relationship before - more, because they've actually been in love before - that doesn't mean they're incapable of moving beyond a bad past experience and falling in love again. Oh, and bisexuality? Happens. Sexual experimentation? Happens too. 'I'm totally straight but I'd do that one girl over there because she's just so sexy and amazing'? Also happens.

Damn the media - it's perfectly possible to truly love more than one person in the course of your lifetime. Now stop pretending your characters' first relationships were uniformly terrible, they simply didn't know what it was to truly be in love and their exes were earthly incarnations of the Hate God whom the character is lucky to have escaped. Especially not when the first lover isn't even an issue any more.

Newsflash, fanficcers: First loves are NOT the only relationships worth having. Get that in your heads, and get over it.